Back to Work Tomorrow – Goals for this Year!

by Pitch Publications | Goals, Reflections And Resolutions

Goals word on note pad stick on blank colorful paper notebook at workspace, year resolution concepts

Tomorrow is our first day back and for the first time in 12 years, I haven’t entered my classroom all summer! While it is a great thing to stop and enjoy your summer, I am worried that I will be returning to a room still packed up! With three kids and a school being painted, there just wasn’t an opportunity to get in there. Wish me luck as I try to get it set up in just a couple of hours!

I am going to lay out some of the broad goals I have for the school year. Some are more personal in nature, but professionally related:

Leave work at work! – I will still be reading and creating things for TpT, but I want it to be fun stuff that I choose to work on. I do much better work when I am doing it because I want to and not because I have to. I need to make sure I use my time wisely at school and don’t get distracted by things that are not important.
Implement my new Ukulele curriculum – I teach Ukulele to 4th and Guitar to 5th. I spent a significant amount of time in the spring creating a curriculum for teaching ukulele. I need to finish mapping it out and successfully implement it starting in January 2015.
Use ActivEngage. I already wrote about using the ActiVotes set I have, but my school also has two iPad carts with ActivEngage installed. Last year I just couldn’t work it out to use it before the end of the year but I really want to try it and see if it has a place in my classroom.
Start an iPad Collection – I use iPads in my room in several ways (I will blog about it one day!) but have increasingly harder times checking out the cart we have. Teachers are using them more and more at our school (yeah!) but as a specials teacher, I usually get the last pick. I fear this year I will have trouble checking them out for my scheduled projects let alone having them for one-on-one practicing of skills.
Be a leader – I have almost a whole new team this year as several dear friends retired and moved on. It will take some time to help the new members adjust to our school and procedures. In addition, I am often tapped to help out with technology items because of my background and experiences and I want to help others see how much technology can enhance their teaching and their student’s learning.
Be ok with not doing it all. Sometimes my house is not perfectly clean. Sometimes I have 100 articles saved to read later in Feedly. Sometimes I only have 3 weeks of plans instead of 4 written out. There are so many ideas for projects I want to work on and only so many hours in the day. I want to focus on what is important (my family, my health, and quality lessons for my students) and if I don’t get to it all, that just has to be ok.